Jerry Smith

I apologize that I haven't learned to post my thoughts more concisely and simply. You are very patient to take the time to reply to them. I would be a pig not to wait for your reply with similar patience. I hope you have a good weekend, or what remains of it.

Danya

The last sentence is where I got confused. It sounded like you were saying there was no question the fetus was more important than the woman. Which is why I brought up Callina's situation.

In your definition they would both be considered valuable. I suppose you would make exceptions for her type of situation. If that is the case then we still have a question on how to legally define this kind of situation.

Do you propose she would then have to go to court and plead her case? Or would it just be in the doctors hands to decide whether or not there is a threat to her health? Could mental or emotional health be a criteria? Do you feel comfortable making such cut and dry decisions that would affect so many people's lives?

Danya

I don't know that this reason makes up only a small number since so many other factors can go into this decision.

This is because you believe that an embryo is a child so I can see why you have a hard time coming to grips with this. I believe an embryo that is in a petri dish is no more a child than the one she is holding inside of her body. The difference is merely location. If we can't decide what a life is based on value, development, lack of cognitive ability, or the greater good for society than you certainly can't decide it based on location. That would be arbitrary.

From what I found your criteria for personhood is: Which means your definition of a person is a thing that will become something else. When you put the word 'become' in the sentence you are no longer defining what it is but what it could become. The same way that I say an embryo can become a person. That does not make it a person.

I don't see how the word 'naturally' can be included in your definition either. With the science of today a child can be concieved and born in ways that we may not consider natural but that does not keep them from becoming a person.
It seems 'natural' is only a condition which you have included to fit your argument. I understand your use of the word to imply 'without medical assistance'. I hope I have that right. A woman can abort naturally or with assistance...a woman can have a child naturally or with assistance. It has nothing to do with what makes it person.

Again, you say baby and I say embryo. You seem to be under the impression that because I have no emotional attachment to an embryo that I wouldn't have one to a baby which is wrong. Regarding adoption I have several points. Please remember that I don't speak for every woman and these are just basic reasons why it isn't as simple as you would make it appear.

1. I do not view an embryo as a child, baby, or a person. It is a potential person. In my view you are asking me to have a baby because of something a stranger believes regardless of my situtation.

2. It is not my responsibility or obligation to provide a child for someone who wants to adopt. So it really has no meaning to the argument. Forcing me to use this as my only option is really only forcing me to have a child against my will.

3. If I were forced to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth I will now have created a child, baby, or a person (or persons if you consider twins, triplets, etc.) I now have two choices. I can take responsibily for this life and raise it regardless of the obstacles that made me not want to have a child in the first place. Or, I can make a devestating decision to give it up and hope for a perfect family to adopt it. Either way my life is never the same.

4. If adopted you have no way of knowing whether the child would be happy and loved or worse off than had I kept it. My opinion is that this couple would be doing society a greater good to adopt a child that is desperatly in need of a good home rather than to wait for a baby to come along. There are many kids who live in one foster home after another because no one wants them. But I would never try to force that on anyone.

That does not even bring into account the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. Rape, incest, desertion, mental illness, drug abuse, domestic violence, are just a few things that IMO one should be able to consider.

I know you feel just as strongly about your definition of life as I do but is it fair to force yours on anyone if this will cause them harm? The only fair way is to let the woman decide for herself and promote birth control, education, and voluntary sterilization whenever possible. At least until science can prove to all of us when life truely begins.

[ March 23, 2002: Message edited by: Danya ]</p>

Jamie_L

Technically speaking, someone's definition of life must be forced on someone. Some may not consider a baby as a person worthy of legal protection. They have a legal definition forced on them which makes it illegal for them to kill an unwanted baby.

So somebody's definition or set of definitions must be embodied in the law. I've read bd-from-kg's arguments in the "12-week old fetus" thread, and they are consistent and well argued. Anyone who is arguing against him should save him some time and go read that thread before asking him to answer the same questions.

Still, I disagree with the definition of personhood that he uses. I'm not sure if it's worth rehashing that debate here or not. However, I think this definition IS at the center of the issue.

Jamie

The AntiChris

Do you mean a definition of "life", or do you mean a definition of the point at which a foetus is accorded statutory rights?

This is a fascinating thread but I must admit I'm struggling to keep up.

Chris

Boro Nut

True, but we could feed every moth on the planet if we really wanted to, and that's why I've made this my mission in life. Next time you see someone pissing in the street, don't be judgemental, he could be one of us.

Boro Nut

Danya

I should have been more clear. I am strictly speaking of first trimester abortions.

Boro Nut

I don't think many people will argue with that, as it's technically impossible to get pregnant that young.

Boro Nut

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

1. Abortion and rape

It was pointed out to you? On subjects this important most people go by the best available evidence; you seem to be satisfied with anecdotal evidence and dim recollections of “supportive research”. Sorry, but you’ll have to do better than that. Even the most careful surveys that I know of indicate that about half of all forcible rapes go unreported, not the “vast majority”. Also, there are no “other forms of coercive sex”, since any form of coercive sex (including use of threats, whether explicit or implicit) is by definition forcible rape. If you are going to base your argument on the claim that a significant percentage of abortions are of fetuses conceived through forcible rape, provide some actual scientific evidence for this claim. Every study that I have seen has concluded that abortions of pregnancies resulting from rape are a tiny fraction of all abortions – well under one case in a thousand.

Well sure, if it were possible to treat all cases fairly, that’s what the law should do. But it isn’t. Here are two examples:

1. Smith loans you some money (and is careful enough to make you sign a contract) You pay him back, but are careless enough to neglect to get a receipt. Smith sues, claiming that you never repaid him. Although you are legally in the right, Smith wins because you have no evidence to show that you repaid.

2. John and Mary Smith tell you one night that if anything should happen to them they want you to raise their children and above all do not want John’s grandparents to have custody. The next morning they die in an accident. John’s grandparents petition for custody. You challenge the petition and tell the court what the Smiths told you. Although you are in the right (the parents’ wishes in such matters are not legally binding, but are almost always honored), the grandparents win because you have no evidence to support your claim.

In both cases it may well be that such claims are true 80% of the time, but they will be dismissed anyway. If you have no proof that something happened, the law must presume that it didn’t, for reasons that I hope are too obvious to have to be explained.

Also, while the accused is given the “benefit of the doubt” in a sense (he or she is innocent until proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt&#8221 , the doubt in question must be based on evidence. As the prosecutor explained in a case where I served on the jury, this phrase means only that the evidence presented should provide no good reason to doubt the person’s guilt, not that there must not be even a shadow of a doubt.

The problem here in the case of abortion is that, as Gloria Steinem herself pointed out, if an exception is made for anyone who alleges rape (even without proof), a large percentage of women who want abortions will claim that they were raped. Only the truthful ones would be denied abortions.

Note: I don’t concede that abortion is justified even in cases of rape, although I would be very reluctant to tell a rape victim that she could not get an abortion. (I’m inclined to think that abortion is immoral even in such cases, but it may well be that it shouldn’t be illegal.) But this is an exceptionally hard case, and I don’t see any reason to get bogged down in an argument about this very rare case when we don’t even agree about the typical case.

2. The responsibility of the woman

Irrelevant. You’re responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your voluntary actions regardless.

Yes. Obviously what it “means” depends on whether the fetus is a “person”. But our dispute at this point was about whether a woman who conceives as a result of consensual sex is responsible for this consequence of her actions. Since you’ve now conceded this point, let’s move on.

3. The rights of the pregnant woman vs. the rights of the fetus

It was obvious in context, both from your original statement and my reply, that I meant that women do not have abortions because of a false perception that the unborn child is threatening them.

Not so. The law requires that you have rational grounds for believing that there is a threat, and even then you may use only the minimum force needed to meet the threat. Even then the action must be reasonably proportional to the perceived threat. There is no way that you would be held harmless for shooting a harmless drunk unless you could show that you had rational grounds for thinking that he posed a serious threat to life or limb. You may not shoot a child who grabs your basketball and runs off with it. And what if the child honestly believes it’s his basketball? Worse yet, what if it really is his basketball? It seems to me that such considerations really do matter; the actual culpability of the person in question is highly relevant.

In the first place, what happened to your analogy of the guy in your house (or room or whatever)? Have you conceded that this analogy favors my case, not yours?

In the second place, so what? What would you conclude from this, and why? Perhaps you can conclude something about the responsibility of the other party, but how does it affect yours? “The devil made me do it?” Come on.

The same “defense” can be offered by a rapist. Shall we therefore him harmless for his actions? So far as I can see, there is no defensible moral principle involved here.

I think you’re getting confused at this point between being at fault and being responsible. The fact that you took precautions could mean that you’re not at fault for the guy’s being locked in the room with no way out, but you’re still responsible for the fact that he is. In the case of pregnancy this distinction is even more important. A woman who conceives is not at fault for having done so, but she bears a responsibility to the person who was brought into existence for the simple reason that she is (jointly with her partner) responsible for his or her very existence. (Of course we’re assuming at this point that it is a “person”. Your argument is that the woman’s rights take precedence over the fetus’s; such an argument assumes that the fetus has rights.)

Yes. No one has complete “sovereignty” over his or her own body anyway. You are not free to pick up a gun, point it at someone, and pull the trigger. You are not free to libel someone. You are not free to Xerox copyrighted material. You are not free to abandon or neglect your children. If you have signed a marriage contract you may not use your body in certain ways. There are several circumstances in which you can be forced to stay somewhere (even in a jail cell) against your will even though you have committed no crime and are not even suspected of a crime. In many situations you are not free to refuse to give a blood or urine sample without severe legal consequences, such as losing your job or being convicted of a crime that you may not have committed. If you have a highly contagious disease you may rightly be forbidden to leave your house; you might even be required to take appropriate medication for it.

Now of course none of these case is perfectly analogous to pregnancy. But that’s because pregnancy is unlike any other situation in a number of important respects. And that’s why your analogies don’t carry much weight. If a situation is substantially unlike any other it’s implausible that the law regarding it should be pretty much like the law governing other situations.

This point is illustrated pretty well by attempts to compare pregnancy to a forced blood transfusion and you comments to the effect that people aren’t required to give up bodily fluids in any other circumstances (a dubious claim anyway, as I noted earlier). Unlike all other situations, the transfer of “body resources” in the case of pregnancy is completely natural. While in other cases such a transfer has to be induced artificially by overcoming the body’s natural defenses against such things, in this case the woman’s body is designed to initiate and facilitate this transfer as soon as the presence of the newcomer is detected. So far as the woman’s body is concerned this newcomer, far from being an intruder, is a welcome guest. It does not try to guard its “resources” against being “stolen” by the fetus, but goes out of its way to provide them freely. Indeed, the fetus couldn’t “take” anything from the mother if it wanted to. If the pregnant woman has a complaint, it’s not against the fetus, but against her own body.

As in all of your examples, you want to pretend that pro-lifers, for some incomprehensible reason, want to impose an obligation on “Person B” toward some arbitrary “Person A”. You ignore the fact that “Person B” has brought Person A into existence. This is factor with such great moral significance that ignoring it makes your examples seem surreal; they have almost no contact with reality. It is perfectly obvious that you have far more obligations and responsibilities toward someone that you created than toward anyone else. And again, this “claim” is hardly a weird anomaly. A woman’s body is designed to bring about this very situation, and to nurture the newcomer until it is ready and able to live independently of her body. Again, if there is some “injustice” involved, it’s the injustice of nature, not of man. The law may or may not choose to recognize the moral claim that arises from this natural process, but the claim exists regardless.

4. The criterion of “personhood” and the moral and legal principles underlying it.

My comments up to now should give you a pretty good idea of the outlines of this argument at least. I’ll present it in detail in a forthcoming post.

Fair enough. What really needs to be done is to examine the actual ethical decisions made regularly in our society with a view to discerning the moral principles in play, and show that a consistent application of these principles would require extending legal protection to unborn humans. My argument is that our current failure to protect the unborn is an anomaly, and a dangerous anomaly in that it undermines the principle of equal protection by arbitrarily denying it to an entire class of human beings.

If your alternative standards really are consistent with other ethical decisions regularly made by members of our society and involve only criteria that are at least arguably morally relevant, and do not beg the question by requiring the being involved to be already born, you have a good case. Even then there could be disagreement as to whether the fact that the proposed criteria are met in other cases is that actual reason why these cases are treated the way they are. But if you were to succeed in doing what you say you have “tried” to do this would go a long way toward defeating my argument.

I don’t find these characteristics “intuitively appealing”. The former is obviously irrelevant and the latter subverts the principle of equal protection. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, we do not base an individual’s rights on his “level of development”.

Let’s not waste time on silly word games. The question was how there can be a “non-arbitrary lower limit standard”. What would make it non-arbitrary? What moral principle would you use to justify using that standard rather than some other?

No, it isn’t, for at least four major reasons. (1) Singling out a particular species for special treatment is arbitrary unless one can point to characteristics of that species that justify doing so. If there were another species that had the characteristics that we value in our own species we would (and should) extend the same kind of legal rights to them that we do to humans. It just happens that there is no other such species (so far as we know). (2) We do not value things merely because of what they were. A person with severe irreversible brain damage that has left him in a deep coma with no chance of recovery is not treated as a “person” merely because he was once a person. (3) Few psychologists believe that newborn babies have self-awareness, yet they are almost universally considered “persons”. (4) We do not (and obviously should not) make anyone’s rights contingent on whether harm to them would cause grief or distress to anyone.

[Note: I’ve made the latter two points, which I consider very important, more than once. You have simply chosen to ignore them. If you are not going to address the lynchpins of my overall argument, there really isn’t much point continuing the discussion.]

Then why are you wasting our time?

Whatever that means. If you have a criterion that is not ad hoc and is not arbitrary, state it.

Sadly, history tells us that this is a vain hope. If government officials are allowed to decide who has rights and who doesn’t, it can be predicted with 100% confidence that the result will be tyranny.

In other words, you totally repudiate the very concept of equality under the law. Sigh. I guess I’ll have to make this argument again as well. Don’t the schools teach the rudiments of democracy any more?

But babies cannot reply to this question. Does that mean they have no value according to your moral framework?

You’ve totally lost me here. Is this relevant to the argument in some obscure way?

Non sequitur.

On the contrary, they explicitly repudiated this idea.

It’s true that there were some well-known limitations in the Founders’ vision in some respects. Some of them (far from a majority, and hardly those who are most remembered today) did not recognize the rights of slaves. Most of them did not recognize the rights of women. But the principles they enunciated and implemented in large part logically entailed that all human beings have these rights, and these principles have been progressively extended to more and more human beings as their inner logic has come to be more widely recognized and appreciated.

Once we come to understand the principles involved and their inner logic, we must, on condition of abandoning rationality itself (which is to say, the very thing that makes us human) apply them wherever they are applicable. We can argue about whether they apply to certain cases, but we cannot just ignore them in cases where they do apply because we find them inconvenient.

5. Direction of future discussion

To keep this discussion within reasonable bounds, at some point we’re going to have to start concentrating on the crucial points of disagreement. I would suggest dropping the discussion of abortion resulting from rape; as far as I’m concerned it’s a non-starter as an argument for legalizing abortion in general. No one who has any understanding of the pro-life position would imagine that any pro-lifer would be take seriously the idea that he fetus’s rights in the vast majority of cases are nullified by a few rare cases. Only those who believe that the fetus has no rights will find this argument to be anything but risible, and they don’t need to be persuaded. I also think that the argument you’ve been trying to make that a woman has a “right” to abort a fetus even if it is entitled to legal protection is simply untenable. Once it is conceded that the fetus is a “person” with rights, the game is over. It can’t be seriously maintained that the rights of the mother, whatever you conceive them to be, take precedence over the fetus’s right to life. The right to life (if it exists in the first place) is obviously going to trump any other considerations.

In any case, I don’t have the time or energy to keep responding point-by-point to such long posts. My future replies will cover one or two specific issues, and won’t necessarily do so by replying directly to your comments.

[ April 01, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Danya

Well, I spent some time coming up with my argument showing how your view on IVF embryos is inconsistent with your views on abortion. I would prefer you respond in the other thread designated for this subject if you are going to respond at all. I have no time for long drawn out analogy's that have nothing to do with the issue in question. Comparing it to criminal activities like theft just helps to make the surrounding issues that you want to dismiss (such as rape)much easier to ignore. Perhaps if you leave those parts out we could get to the point of the true argument much faster.